As the 100th day approached of a war with Iran President Trump once said the U.S. won “in the first hour” of fighting on February 28, equity markets began to exhibit the kind of fear one would expect with 20% of the world’s oil and fertilizer trapped in the Persian Gulf.

Until today, Trump’s tap dancing between threats of Iran’s catastrophic destruction and last minute postponements due to supposed breakthroughs in negotiations, along with the release of hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), had kept the oil price down and equity markets up.

But the president can only dance so long. The reality that there is no good way out of this war without explicitly or tacitly acceding to Iran’s demands may be starting to dawn on investors. That means the Iran War, whether it ends soon via U.S. capitulation or becomes yet another Middle East quagmire that drags on for years, will ultimately yield no benefit to the American people. All they’ll be left with are the costs, which in this case could be considerable and ongoing.

For average Americans, the empire is “all pain no gain.”

Proponents of the empire insist it is vital to “U.S. interests.” They argue that average Americans couldn’t enjoy the prosperity and freedom they do without the global standing army and gargantuan military budget to support it. But when pressed for details, the cause/effect relationships between the constant interventions and whatever freedom and prosperity Americans enjoy always gets vaguer and vaguer the more details one demands.

Regarding the current war, it is argued that Iran is a threat to Israel, a key ally. But when asked, “how does this alliance benefit Americans,” one usually receives replies like, “Israel is the only democracy in the region!” To which one could reasonably ask, “How do Americans benefit from there being a democracy in the region?”

There is usually some reference to oil at this point, which prompts the question, “How does America improve its access to Middle Eastern oil by antagonizing the oil producers?”

The arguments for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine are similarly vague. And when one tries to pin proponents of the empire down by saying, “Explain, step by step, how Americans would have been adversely affected if this intervention never occurred,” one is met only with platitudes. “American Exceptionalism.” “Indispensable Nation.” “Western values.”

Maybe it’s hard to explain concretely because it’s just bunk.

Even the foreign policy realists like John Mearscheimer and Robert Pape, who have been 100 percent correct in their predictions about how this war would go, warn us that America cannot relapse into “isolationism,” lest other powers like China “fill the vacuum.”

It is important to understand isolationism as both the interventionists and the realists define it. Isolationism is refusing to take responsibility for security issues all over the world. While the neocons advocate kinetic military operations and the realists suggest strategies like containment and offshore balancing, they all agree Americans have to pay for the massive military structure necessary for either strategy.

Anything less is “isolationism,” even if the country in question has robust trade relationships with every existing and emerging power on earth and a military more than capable of enforcing its own security interests. That is still a recipe for disaster because it allows for the emergence of new threats like China and reemergence of old ones like Russia. And we all know no nation could prosper and grow while allowing that to happen.

Except China. It seems to be working just fine for China.